"The Righteous Among the Nations": Bonhoeffer, Yad Vashem and the Church
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1986, twenty-three years after establishing the Righteous Among the Nations project, Yad Vashem brought down the first of its many decisions to deny the title to the martyred Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As recently as October 2003, when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the summary of the reasons behind the committee's rejection could be published, Yad Vashem has consistently maintained that Bonhoeffer falls outside the scope of the legal definition. While he does deserve recognition as a meritorious fighter against the Nazi regimeaccording to Mordecai Paldiel, he was "one ofthe good guys"l -Bonhoeffer simply does not fit the criteria of righteous, as established by the Yad Vashem Law (5713/1953) of August 1953. Curiously, Bonhoeffer's own ecclesiastical authorities adopted a similar stance during the Nazi era. As Victoria Barnett has noted, neither Bonhoeffer's nor Niemoeller's names were included in churches' weekly Fürbittenlisten because their resistance was deemed to be political rather than theological. As far as the bishops were concerned, Bonhoeffer did not deserve prayerful intercession within the context of corporate worship, as his imprisonment had nothing to do with his faith. The intent of this article is neither to argue against Yad Vashem's decision (with which I nonetheless disagree), nor to explore the ecclesiastical-political context which gave rise to the general malaise from which the German churches suffered during the Nazi period. Rather, this paper will suggest that Bonhoeffer's reflections on the Beatitudes provide a more appropriate paradigm of ~hKawcruVll (righteousness) and correlative ethical praxis than either the Church or Yad Vashem have to date permitted. The key texts that will be considered are Nachfolge, Ethics, Letters and Papers from Prison — and, of course, the text of Bonhoeffer's own life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".